It is Time for Technology to Give You a Strategic Edge

It is Time for Technology to Give You a Strategic Edge

What technology do providers need to gain a competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving marketplace?

For the past decade, community behavioral healthcare providers needed technology to meet three primary business requirements:

Accurately bill a limited number of payers for services

Meet state and federal regulatory requirements

Automate compliance reporting.

Given these three business needs, technology vendors focused on designing and building systems that were effective at processing high volumes of data and transactions. While billing and compliance rules changed regularly, the systems needed some adaptability, but flexibility was not an essential ingredient for providers’ success.

NOW ALL THAT IS CHANGING.

Today’s providers still need to bill payers and meet regulatory requirements, but providers are also faced with multiple paths in which they can expand their services and, in turn, their business. In addition to the traditional lines of business (LOB) which include: mental health, substance abuse, intellectual and developmental disabilities and supporting programs, today’s community behavioral healthcare providers are increasingly encountering new opportunities to play a larger role in their local healthcare system. This includes expanding into new lines of business such as physical healthcare and care management. These new LOBs are emerging in large part due to the increasing focus on reducing the skyrocketing costs of populations with chronic and comorbid conditions.

For leading community behavioral health businesses, this shift is both daunting and exciting. Now more than ever, providers are getting focused on the following four categories:

Measuring and demonstrating quality – participating in value based and bundled contract arrangements with healthcare partners

Diversifying revenues by expanding beyond Medicaid and Medicare into commercial plans and expanding service contracts

To solve the new business challenges associated with each category, providers are having to think differently about what they need from their technology to succeed in each of the four categories. In the white paper, “4 Key Opportunities For Behavioral Health, ” Qualifacts thought leaders dig into the limitations of hard-coded, tightly connected, monolithic architectures of legacy EHR platforms and the opportunities flexible, loosely coupled, modern service oriented architecture (SOA) EHR platforms offers providers looking to maximize their chances for future success and gain competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving environment.